Page:Von Heidenstam - Sweden's laureate, selected poems of Verner von Heidenstam (1919).djvu/21

 tration and details on the subject of Swedish poetry in general.

Fortunately, Verner von Heidenstam is such an individual genius that we can sketch his immediate literary background very briefly. Between 1850 and 1870 Swedish poetry languished in a sort of mid-Victorian back-water. About the latter date a new vitality came into being with the work of Viktor Rydberg and Count Snoilsky. Rydberg sent a glow of humanity into his classic and philosophic lyrics. Snoilsky, beginning with a colorful volume of Italian poems, developed from an aesthete into a democrat, writing ballads from Swedish history and affirming the doctrine that art should minister to the hungry multitude, not to "culture's overladen boards." The popular impulse which appeared to a modified degree in the poetry of Rydberg and Snoilsky was exhibited as the crudest and most violent realism in the novels and plays of August Strindberg, who held the center of the literary stage during the eighties.

Thus it was upon a field of combat that Heidenstam made his début with his first volume of poems in 1888. The old sentimentalism had largely disappeared and a fierce war was being waged between the extreme, unmitigated realists and the new, more vital idealists. Into this combat Heidenstam at once plunged on the side of the idealists along with two other distinguished poets, Gustaf Fröding and Oscar Levertin.

Fröding is at once the Burns and the Heine of